Time to stop breaking your promises - dealing with 404's, broken URLs and planning for change

#JWC15 @RCheesleyJoomla! World Conference 2015

Bangalore, India Sheraton HotelNovember 6-8

It's time to stop breaking your promises!

Ruth [email protected]



About me

Based in Ipswich, UK

Joomla Community Leadership Team member, involved with Joomla since 2008

CEO of Virya Group Limited

Integrator, Marketer, SEO nerd, cat lady!

@RCheesley / +RuthCheesley



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How do we break our promises?

Site structure changes

Changing extensions

Migrations

Optimisation

Unpublished items

Broken extensions

Changing categories

Multilingual gone wrong



https://http.cat



Change is

inevitable



Why Audit?

Identify existing problems

Compare new site/migration with old site

Identify SEO problems – titles, metadata, heading tags, etc

Review internal and external links



AUDIT

screamingfrog.co.uk



ScreamingFrog Audit



AUDIT

g.co/searchconsole



Search Console Audit



PLANPREPAREPERFORM

bit.ly/jwclinkmigration



Plan

What needs to be redirected?

What needs to be killed off?

Check for redirect chains

How will redirects/response codes be executed (htaccess, com_redirect etc.)

How will you monitor going forward?



Prepare – Create rulesUse a spreadsheet to match old URLs to new URLs

Decide what you will do with the URLs

- 301 permanent redirect- 302 temporary redirect- 410 gone

Create appropriate rules in your tool of choice:

- com_redirect- htaccess file bit.ly/301template



Using com_redirect

bit.ly/comredirect



Using 'Advanced Mode'

bit.ly/comredirect



Redirect or Rewrite Rule?Simple redirects in htaccess to redirect http://my-domain.com/article to http://mydomain.com/news/article

Use a basic redirect rule for 301's

Redirect 301 http://www.my-domain.com/article http://www.my-domain.com/news/article

Use a rewrite rule for more options

RewriteRule ^article(.*)$ http://my-domain.com/news/article$1 [r=301,NC]



The anatomy of a rewrite ruleRewriteEngine On # Turn on the rewriting engine – must feature once

# Add rule that redirects a single URL /article to new-domain.com/article

RewriteRule ^article/?$ http://www.new-domain.com/article/ [R,NC,L] # Temporary Move

RewriteRule ^article/?$ http://www.new-domain.com/article/ [R=301,NC,L] # Permanent Move

bit.ly/mod-rewrite-cheatsheet

# Add rule that redirects all content from old-domain.com to new-domain.com

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} old-domain\.com [NC]

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.new-domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]



How to kill a URL (properly)

# Add rule that permanently kills /my-dead-url

RewriteRule "my-dead-url" "-" [G,NC]

This example uses the "-" syntax for the rewrite target, there's no reason to rewrite to another URI if you are killing it!

“Embracing HTTP error code 410 means embracing the impermanence of all things.”



Sort out your error pages!Default Joomla error pages will show, unless you do something else.

Create your own custom error pages following this tutorial:

https://docs.joomla.org/Creating_a_Custom_404_Error_Page

(Bonus points if you include status cats!)



Other toolsThere are numerous tools in the JED .. BUT:

● Most will have a performance impact

● You should know what you are doing and do it properly

● Some can do more harm than good



MONITOR



Tools for monitoring 404's

com_redirect

Google Analytics

Search Console

bit.ly/monitorlinks



Analytics Alerts

bit.ly/monitorlinks



Analytics alerts

bit.ly/monitorlinks



Search console alerts

bit.ly/monitorlinks



So about those broken promises ...

I PROMISE THAT I WILL DO MY BEST

TO KEEP THE SEO LAW

TO PLAN MY MIGRATIONS

TO MAKE REDIRECTIONS

TO SHOW 404's THE DOOR

#JPromise



Credits

Icons made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com (Creative Commons BY 3.0)

Images from Fotolia under license

HTTP Status Cats https://http.cat

Time to stop breaking your promises - dealing with 404's, broken URLs and planning for change

Technology

Transcript of Time to stop breaking your promises - dealing with 404's, broken URLs and planning for change